The best movie Easter eggs

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Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis staged a rather elaborate Easter egg for his classic film. When Marty first traveled to 1955, his DeLorean time machine crashed into a barn. When the owners of the barn—which include a man, a woman, and two kids—investigated, they mistook Marty for an alien invader. Dad ran to get his shotgun, and Marty jumped back into the DeLorean and raced away. Dad pursued and shot his own mailbox as Marty escaped. Just before it exploded, the mailbox revealed the family name to be “Peabody.”

During the closing credits, the names of the family were revealed: Ma, Pa, and Daughter Peabody. Only the son was given a first name: Sherman. Mr. Peabody and Sherman were time travelers in the cartoon “Peabody’s Improbable History” which appeared on the ’60s TV series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. They later returned in the 2014 animated feature Mr. Peabody and Sherman.

The “Star Wars” robots make two appearances in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” First, the pair noticeably shows up as a sort of hieroglyphs on a pillar, right as Indiana Jones finds the ark. Then, shortly after this moment there’s an even bigger depiction of the two on a wall behind Jones and Sallah as they lift the ark. This one also features Princess Leia, who is kneeling next to R2-D2 as she presumably uploads data with C-3PO.

R2-D2 has made appearances in other movies as well. J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” snuck the little robot amid floating debris in space. Abrams put R2-D2 into “Star Trek Into Darkness” as well. The robot also made its way into “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and another Steven Spielberg movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

As mentioned, Pixar movies are famous for their Easter eggs, but they are usually self-referential. The “Toy Story” series, however, has many nods to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” In the first “Toy Story,” for instance, the pattern of the carpet in Sid’s house is the same as in the Overlook Hotel.

In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy tries to stay awake and is watching a trailer for Evil Dead on her bedroom TV. To return the favor, Sam Raimi put Freddy's razor glove on the wall of the tool shed in which Ash gets "groovy" in Evil Dead 2.

In “Inglourious Basterds,” a leaf falls onto an Austrian-born, Jewish soldier, and its appearance mimics the yellow “Star of David” that Jewish people were forced to wear on the left side of their chest by the Nazis.

In 2007, James Wan directed Dead Silence, about the malevolent ghost of a murdered ventriloquist. Wan, who also directed Saw, seems to enjoy putting that movie's white-and-red-faced doll in his other movies... at least for a moment. Look closely and you can see the Saw doll sitting on the floor in Dead Silence.

Remember the Batman-Superman marquee in I Am Legend that got comic geeks in a tizzy about the possibility of such a thing happening? It's in there because I Am Legend producer Akiva Goldman was at one time involved in a planned Supes/Dark Knight team-up.

If you've seen Shaun of the Dead, it's obvious that co-writer and star Simon Pegg and co-writer and director Edgar Wright are a huge fans of George A. Romero's Dead franchise. The admiration is reciprocated by Romero, who cast Pegg and Wright as a "photo booth zombies" in 2005's Land of the Dead.

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the earliest pioneers of the movie Easter egg, and famously had a cameo in 39 of his 52 films. In an homage to the late director, Gus Van Sant placed a Hitchcock look-a-like in his shot-for-shot remake of the Hitchcock horror classic Psycho. In the scene, Hitchcock is yelling at Van Sant.

Stuart Gordon's 2001 feature Dagon is an adaptation of two of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories: Dagon and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The character Paul wears a sweatshirt from Miskatonic University, a place frequented by the characters in Lovecraft's universe.